The creeping corporatisation threatening the UK National Health Service calls to mind a scene from a horror movie. In the film, a stalker’s menacing phone calls originate frighteningly close to home. To the audience’s terror, we eventually learn that the calls are coming from inside the house!

After US President Donald Trump said that the NHS could be one of the things ‘on the table’ in post-Brexit trade negotiations, UK leaders rushed to declare that the NHS was ‘not for sale!’ However, no amount of playing down Trump’s words can erase the fact that privatisation threats to the NHS are already coming from inside the house.

With the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 paving the way, private interests are already well entrenched in the NHS, including the Hospital Corporation of America and UnitedHealth Group among other US-based firms. The Centre for Health and Public Interest reports that there are now 53,000 NHS contracts with the private sector, and NHS private sector spending is around £10 billion a year.

I am the executive director of National Nurses United (NNU), the largest union of bedside nurses in the US. Take it from us, nothing good can come from continuing this trend. Rolling back a public good and increasingly privatising bits of the NHS will make health care in the UK look a lot more like the real-life horror movie we are living through in the United States.

As a registered nurse myself, I have experienced the moral distress nurses feel trying to heal people in our deadly, profit-driven system, which is riddled with impossible choices. Do our patients pay their astronomical medical bills – or buy food for their families? Do they get preventative care, or wait until they are in cardiac arrest to seek (expensive) attention?We watch real people, whose names we know and whose hands we hold, suffer and die every single day in the name of corporate profits

Rebecca Wood, whose daughter Charlie was born with health complications, recently testified to the US Congress that prohibitive costs forced her to choose between paying for her daughter’s care or for her own. Ultimately, delaying her own care allowed a serious jaw infection to spread. She subsequently had all of her teeth pulled out, and her jaw scraped in a six-hour procedure that she undertook only under local anesthetic – general anesthesia was too expensive.

Renelsa Caudill, a registered nurse in Washington DC, recounted another horror story to Pacifica Evening News. Caudill was in the middle of conducting a CT scan for a patient with a serious heart disease when her team received a call telling them to take the patient off the table because the procedure was not covered by his insurance.

For US nurses, these experiences are more than anecdotes or statistics. We watch real people, whose names we know and whose hands we hold, suffer and die every single day in the name of corporate profits. We nurses are also patients in this same system, fighting our employers just to maintain health insurance benefits for ourselves and our families when our time and energy could be better spent fighting for safe working conditions.

That’s why the NNU has spent decades leading the grassroots movement for our own country’s version of guaranteed health care as a human right, Medicare for All. It’s heartening to see more muscle than ever before in our nurse-led people’s movement, with Medicare for All now solidly discussed in the mainstream and a majority of people in the US supporting it. In fact, most Democrats in the US House of Representatives have signed onto the Medicare for All Act 2019 – a level of support was almost unthinkable only a few years ago.

This progress has only happened on the shoulders of tens of thousands of everyday people. Using ‘big organising’ techniques – pioneered by Momentum in the UK – nurses and our allies have been able to ramp up our personal interactions with voters, neighbour by neighbour. This spring, NNU sponsored 150 Medicare for All community organising events across the United States, knocking on tens of thousands of doors and driving similar numbers of calls into Congress. The for-profit US health care industry has endless funds to fight Medicare for All, but we have the people to fight back.

As US nurses and our allies fight for health care as a human right, we are also standing in strong solidarity with our siblings in the UK to defend the NHS as a public good. Our fights are one and the same, as the same corporate interests attempt to profit from UK and US patients alike. We are both part of a global movement of everyday people fighting back against our public services, especially health care, being starved of funds, cut and privatised.

The global trend of ‘austerity-then-privatisation’ is undoubtedly a direct attack on the people. Without the security these public services provide, working people do not have the freedom to be involved fully in their communities, their unions, and the democratic process. Meanwhile, corporations are free to reap more profit, unchecked.

With Brexit looming, it’s more important than ever for a mass movement of people to fight in global solidarity against corporate health care interests circling the NHS. As NNU nurses know all too well, times of chaos for everyday people are occasions of immense opportunity for corporations.

Many Puerto Ricans share with their fellow US citizens an inability to afford preventative health care, a lack of which can increase the severity of chronic conditions like diabetes. When people already struggling with deprivation are suddenly battling to keep their insulin cold in a powerless, roofless house, we are really living in a state of next-level disaster.

Moments of crisis are exactly when corporations rush swoop in, under the guise of ‘privatize-public’ interest, to gobble up government contracts for work that is often poorly conducted and with little oversight. Naomi Klein dubs this the ‘shock doctrine’: using times of public shock to suspend democratic norms and ram through corporate interests.Nurses can see very clearly that people and families are just trying to stay healthy and safe; a goal that is increasingly difficult in a world of extreme wealth inequality, austerity, and privatisation of public resources.

In Puerto Rico, RNRN nurses saw disaster profiteering in action, as desperate people struggled to find food. The US government had awarded a lucrative contract to Tribute Contracting LLC, a company with no experience in large-scale disaster relief to provide 30 million meals. By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had only delivered 50,000. The meals they did deliver, sent to Puerto Rican patients with no power, did not come with the means to heat them. RNRN nurses scrambled to find groceries for desperate families with no effective government assistance in sight.

Some disasters are human-made. This spring, RNRN deployed teams of volunteer nurses and nurse practitioners to staff an Arizona shelter for migrants and asylum seekers. These volunteers witnessed the impact of the US government’s inhumane and self-created ‘immigration crisis,’ in which thousands of people legally seeking asylum are being denied that right, often incarcerated in private, for-profit facilities before being deported.

At the shelter, RNRN volunteer Maria Rojas met a Guatemalan mother whose husband had been murdered by a gang back home, causing her to flee to the United States with her son. During the arduous journey, she had to shake the bus driver awake to keep him from crashing. Now, she was being asked to get on another bus. Rojas followed the nurses’ oath to advocate for her patients by explaining to the distraught woman where she was headed next.

Rojas’ compassion was amplified by her knowledge of where the woman had already been: months earlier, Rojas had joined RNRN volunteers on a medical mission to Guatemala, providing care in poor communities hit by one of the country’s many active volcanoes. ‘The conditions people were living in before the eruption were already problematic,’ said Rojas, noting that gang violence is rampant in Guatemala, fueled by over a century of US intervention and more recently by corporate-driven climate crisis. When droughts, hurricanes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions occur, the poor are always hit hardest.

‘We saw a lot of stress-induced issues: headaches, bronchial and other lung issues, people complaining of not being able to sleep’ said Rojas. ‘We also saw children with parasites because many don’t have shoes’.

The view we have of the migration pipeline is just one reason why nurses ‘get political’ – why we call our legislators, march in the streets and join forces with progressive leaders and activists in the US and around the world. Our nurses have front row seats to disasters that have been fueled and exploited by corporate profiteering.

Nurses all over the world make an oath to protect people. We are, in a sense, the guardians of humanity. All over the planet, our patients are everyday people. Nurses can see very clearly that people and families are just trying to stay healthy and safe, a goal that is increasingly difficult in a world of extreme wealth inequality, austerity, and privatisation of public resources. That is why we stand up and fight. And as union nurses, we know that when we stand together in numbers too big to deny, we can win.

The World Transformed

The NNU is thrilled to continue building our solidarity with progressive UK activists and leaders at The World Transformed this September. Shared strategies have already helped in our Medicare for All campaign, and UK activists have even phone banked with us – calling key US districts to tell voters how precious it is to have health care as a human right.

The forces trying to prevent Medicare for All are the same forces that want to destroy the NHS. The NNU commitment to this fight is clear: We have joined hands with nursing unions and public sector unions around the world, through Global Nurses United and its affiliation with Public Services International, to fight this common enemy in a more coordinated, intentional, and strategic fashion.

We know that corporations will always try to slip in the backdoor and privatise public services during societal confusion and chaos. But the people are organised. We are united. Because our patients’ rights have no borders, our fight to protect them also knows no boundaries. And nurses never, ever give up.

Bonnie Castillo, RN, is executive director of National Nurses United, the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in the United States.

The crux of Mark Jenkin’s new film Bait is summed up in a single terse exchange. Martin, a Cornish fisherman, is caught in an argument with the pub landlady. His brother, Steven, has given up trying to make a living from fishing and is renting out the boat – which Martin relied on for his own livelihood – to tourists. Exasperated, the landlady asks, ‘do you think Steven cares how he makes his money?’ Martin replies, ‘well, he fucking should do’.

In Bait, the audience is forced to confront, again and again, the callousness of British society. Ours is a nation where people have been told that they don’t have to care about how they make money. The property-owning classes, allowed to consolidate their wealth through buy-to-let, have pushed us into a cost-of-living crisis. Our clothes and electrical goods are made in sweat-shops that we are aware of, but disinclined or unable to boycott. British-made bombs and teargas cannisters are bursting over the heads of civilians worldwide while we watch on TV. The earth’s atmosphere is heating up because our industrial economics, which have already immiserated billions. We close our borders to people fleeing these catastrophes, and pay off other countries to detain them instead.

None of these global issues are addressed in Bait, a tightly focused and well-observed social drama in which local workers are pitted against tourist landlords. In its careful and persistent presentation of socio-economic conflict, however, the film reveals at a microcosmic level the pitiless logic which has produced macrocosmic calamity.

The drama rests on the intergenerational relationship between the Cornish Ward family and the ‘plummy’ Leighs, moving in from hundreds of miles away. They are brought together both by economic and social circumstances: although the Wards have sold their house to the Leighs, Martin still needs to get to the beach by a ramp on the property, where he parks his van. The Leighs, feeling that this disturbs their holiday-guests, have the vehicle clamped. The Ward son also starts going out with the Leigh daughter, the only genuinely kindly relationship depicted between local and incoming people.

Despite the literal sense in which the two families live side by side, the Leighs do everything they can to minimise their contact with the Wards. Performing polite acquaintance, they patronise the Wards, set up legalistic intermediaries, and begin to walk past without acknowledgement. Interactions soon tip from basic unpleasantness into a criminality borne from privilege. By the film’s climax, its antagonists are pointlessly, carelessly, unwittingly murderous. On the way there, they subject people they barely know to grinding humiliations, stripping them of their agency while telling them to be grateful for the mistreatment.

The film is bleak, but witty – albeit with a one-sided emphasis. The Wards can joke, be gentle, and take an interest in their surroundings even while expressing disappointment and hostility. The Leighs and their fellow holiday-makers manage only to insult, swear, sneer and complain. Though clear where its makers’ sympathies lie, Bait does not suffer from imbalance and its characters are well-rounded.

The film’s success isn’t only thematic. It is also a great formal achievement. The decision to shoot on scratchy, high-contrast 16mm film feels apt, not gimmicky. By eschewing naturalism, the expressive qualities of low-grade film are brought out. The use of black-and-white footage can be read as making a temporal point, harking back to eras past. Rather than interpreting this as a commentary on people ‘left behind’, the filmmakers have employed the aesthetic purposefully to play with the trope. They know that many audiences will want to romanticise the Cornish experience, or feel nostalgic remorse at the declining local fishing traditions. The footage is grainy like the protagonist’s van is weather-worn and the houses are quaintly run-down. When an incongruously modern, shiny Land Rover rolls into frame, the disparity is only emphasised. Jenkin’s is a psychological rather than an aesthetic deployment of film.

British cinema audiences also have come to associate socially engaged cinema with a documentary-style, or ‘kitchen sink’ realism, which purports to record the external world objectively. Bait nods to but does not follow this tradition. It stays firmly within the realms of the possible but is constructed with lyricism. Jenkin’s embrace of artifice – in sound as much as image – is powerful. It forces the audience to consider the film as an object, not just a story, to ask questions of the filmmaker’s intentions and of themselves. As such, Bait can be seen as part of a wider trend in socially-engaged filmmaking which risks alienating its audience in the name of subjective argumentation. Although each director is producing very different work, the surrealism of Boots Riley’s (2018) Sorry to Bother You and the fusion of documentary and the counterfactual in Ayo Akingbade’s trilogy No News Today (2016-19) echo Jenkin’s vision.

Will Bait make audiences care differently about British society and inequality – and is caring enough? When I watched the film at the cinema, an elderly couple with accents as plummy as the Leighs loudly complained that they couldn’t read the rolling end credits. They wanted to know where, precisely, the film had been shot. They thought they recognised the locations. As they walked out of the cinema, one of them remarked: ‘It really makes you think differently about Cornwall’. How differently remains to be seen.

[This article features in the forthcoming edition of Red Pepper magazine: Land Labour Liberty. Subscribe now to get your copy, while stocks last]

During the week Boris Johnson came to power, James Butler and Richard Seymour discussed the changing dynamics within the Conservative Party and the right more generally

James Butler It seems to me that the current crisis of the Tory Party extends well beyond immediate contingencies. As a crude heuristic, we might group the various factors of this crisis thus: first, an electoral headache produced by the Brexit Party, splitting the Tory base and changing the electoral calculus in England; second, the ascent of Boris Johnson and the dominance of Brexit-mania among the Tory grassroots; third, the party’s apparent ideological weakness, and the concentration of its vote among older and wealthier strata of the electorate.

The significance of all of these turn, I suppose, on what you think the causal sequence is: if these defects are largely a consequence of Brexit, then when Brexit is resolved we should expect to see them remedied; if, instead, the initial political impetus for Brexit came from these problems, then we should only expect them to worsen. I tend to the latter view.

There is a tendency among bien-pensant liberals to think the Brexit fervour gripping the party is a sign of a sudden derogation from Burkean principles of fastidious scepticism and pragmatic adaptation; if these things were ever true of the Tory Party, they certainly haven’t been since 1979. But it’s right, I think, to see its current direction as curious. We know that the Conservatives are unlike most other right-wing parties in Europe, as they’re a curious amalgam of feudal land interests, inherited wealth and the beneficiaries of more contemporary forms of capitalism, including the City of London, but also those who profited from Thatcherism. Most, though not all, of these sectors would prefer the relative ease of European Union membership. So what drives the other position – and why has it attained hegemony in the bureaucracy and parliamentary expression of Conservatism now? After all, this position has been popular among the Tory base for decades.

Those inclined to a historical perspective have reached for comparison with tariff reform and the corn laws as issues that have similarly divided the party – i.e. the relation of individual Conservatives to major, structural economic issues, and especially ones that pull individual elements of the Conservative coalition in different directions. Those are useful analogies, but I think there are two other factors here. The first is mass suffrage: there is a popular base of the Tory Party exercising a disciplinarian hand over its political expression, both in the sense that the membership has delivered Johnson to No.10, and that the wider electorate moved significantly towards Farage in the European elections. This surely constrains the options available to the party elite.The Tory Party has been left with little in the way of intellectual renewal and an instinctual reach for old certainties The second is less tangible, but I think also important. The ideological exhaustion of the Cameron era, and the failure of Theresa May’s attempt at an authoritarian, British version of Christian Democracy, has left the Tory Party with little in the way of intellectual renewal and an instinctual reach for old certainties. Can that sustain a Conservative government, and is it likely to change under Johnson? What do you make of this broad-brush portrait? Do you think it misses anything?

Richard Seymour I think you’re right, in your adumbration, to emphasise the politics of entropy. I just want to put this in a longer trajectory.

The Conservatives have been in syncopated, secular decline since 1945. Reasons include the decline of empire, its indexed authoritarianism and its promise of national supremacy. The cultural loosening of confessional sectarianism. The absorption of professionals into the public sector. Expanded university education. Traditional Toryism – you’re right that it was never Burkean; even Burke was never Burkean – was dying by 1979.

Thatcherism arrested the decline. She united motley ideologies and interests opposing the post-war settlement: market liberals, nationalist authoritarians, rent-seeking financiers, tax-shy small businesses and careerist workers. That alliance abruptly fell apart in 1992. Since then, the Conservatives have won a single election, in 2015, with just over a quarter of the vote. We’re living through the fall-out from the Thatcherite recomposition of capital, party and state.

Not coincidentally, the precipitating moment of the split was the European Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, catalysing right-wing dissatisfaction with the Maastricht Treaty. Thatcher had warned that Europe was becoming a vehicle for ‘state socialism’ through such expedients as minimum labour standards. However paranoid, this was rooted in a certain class rationality.

Thatcherism had politically empowered a broad entrepreneurial sector: small business, nouveau riches and middling firms. Medium-sized capital is crucial here. Not the Unilevers and HSBCs. Local businesses with a few hundred employees, like the Brexit-supporting ReidSteel. Boutique financiers like Brexit Party funder Jeremy Hosking.

If Johnson delivers the Conservative Party to the Farageites, it loses its alliance with the ruling class
Or ‘self-made’ spread-betting millionaire and early UKIP donor Stewart Wheeler. Among their ideological clarions are John Longworth, former director‑general of the British Chambers of Commerce, Leave campaigner, and now spokesperson for the Brexit Party. This is quite similar to the class basis of the Tea Party right in the US.

The interests and class purview of medium-sized capital are closer to the petty bourgeoisie than the multinationals. The latter are the predators, the ‘globalists’, snuffing out competition; much as politically-correct bureaucracies supposedly stifle the ‘colloquial’ cultures in which these businesses are rooted. But they are more affluent and influential than shopkeepers, and their voice within Conservatism is magnified by the rabid tabloids.

If Osbornite austerity had worked on its own terms, perhaps they would have remained mostly loyal. But amid prolonged stalemate, with their profit margins under stress, and amid a legitimacy crisis for the state, they have been increasingly politically volatile. In the 2014 Euro elections, more than a fifth of owners and managers of firms employing over 200 people backed UKIP. Most of these would have been dyed-in-the-wool Tories, their Farageism a metastasis of Thatcherism. Hence they couldn’t be ignored, or placated. They’ve now overthrown the Osborne wing of Thatcherism. They just don’t have decisive control of the party.

The question is, will Boris just give it to them? If he tried stringing them along, as I suspect he’d rather, the resulting backlash would burn the party to the ground and salt the earth where it stood. Yet, if he actually delivers the Conservative Party to the Farageites, it loses its alliance with the ruling class. It loses funding, institutional leverage and crucial voters. It becomes a protest party.

James Butler I think we agree that the Conservative Party is in a process of ideological decline or disintegration, marked by the fracturing of its vote (to, as you say, various iterations of Farageism). There is a convincing way of reading the post-’97 variations of Toryism as one attempt after another to find a cohesive ideological presentation with as much appeal as Thatcher: Cameron’s Notting Hill recension of economic Toryism with relaxation on social diversity; May’s authoritarian nationalism combined with a concern for the deserving wretched or creditably poor.

If Johnson is neither of these, is he just a return to the Thatcherite leitmotiv? As you suggest, I think it’s true that he’s faced with a more acute version of the division over Europe than Thatcher was, and I don’t see a plausible way of holding the two political preferences together. The conflicts you outline at the level of economic interest are persuasive – so if this is true at the structural level, what’s going on at the political level?

There is the question of the membership. Richard Crossman once observed that the Labour Party formed its collective structures as a pooling of strength, to forge a vehicle that could break into a political system otherwise closed to it. Its vitiated internal democracy was key both to forging a sense of control and allowing the relative autonomy of the PLP (with the sad consequences visible today).

But he also noted an inevitable mirroring effect in the party of the ruling class as well: its modernisation and semi-democratisation, in response to socialist threat, and as a mode of party renewal. In the context of a party of capital – which requires strong management of sometimes divergent interests and a stake in preserving inequality – any mode of democratic control has the latent potential for explosive contradictions. Censure and threats of removal of anti-Brexit MPs is a foretaste of that; it has the potential to get a lot worse as it comes in closer contact with political reality. And yet the mechanisms of control and central coercion, the willingness to use them and the historic amenability of Conservative members to central discipline would make it foolish for the left to rely on this slow internal combustion.

Nonetheless, the gradual assertion of Tory grassroots’ preferences over a historically entirely autonomous parliamentary body is significant. I think we should see this in relation to the strangeness of the British party system in a European context: the party institutions have broadly weathered the decline of the mass-membership model, partly adapting to technocratic or mediatised forms without ever quite divesting of their historic structure and form. In Labour, of course, this left the door open to Corbynism. The situation on the right is different in important ways – including at times the existence of electorally viable parties to the Tories’ right – but it prompts me to wonder whether the Johnson ascendancy is the end of an ideological and political conflict within the party, or the opening of a new front in it.Can the fault-lines within the Tories be wrenched further apart?

I have also been thinking about the Tory attitude to democracy in general. There has always been a greater fondness for decisionism and distrust of deliberation in the Tory ranks than sympathetic historians grant. But this has acquired a new urgency now that a single act of political decision – the referendum – has become identified (cynically or sincerely) with the totality of democratic politics, such that all other forms of deliberation or acts of government are suffered only insofar as they ‘fulfil’ that ‘mandate’.

Obviously, from the left, this is an unacceptable vision of politics. But I wonder if this is the lens through which we ought to view the mania for prorogation which gripped many Tory MPs recently. If so, ought we to look at the new Johnson cabinet – the Britannia Unchained generation in power – through the intermittent Conservative project of attempting to delineate proper ‘bounds’ to democracy? Thus the desire to roll back employment legislation and ‘improper’ intervention in the world of work. (A caveat: the initial Johnson strategy seems caught between this and a retail politics of strategic spending – can the two work together for any duration of time?)

Most politicians do not reflect very deeply on the politics they possess or the world they engineer. That is almost certainly true of Johnson. So what value, then, in attempting to discern these deeper issues? I think if we can understand the deeper contours of the project, we can make decent predictions about what strategy will work, and what won’t.

For instance, how far ought Labour to pursue a renewed constitutional and democratic vision, and how can it be made to bite on the opposition; where will their weakness lie? Can the fault-lines within the Tories be wrenched further apart? And, most importantly, what route will Johnson take on Brexit? My bet is that he will pursue brinksmanship and ramp up anti-parliamentary rhetoric until he believes he can consolidate all the pro-Brexit forces behind him, believing that as we approach the deadline, the Commission will concede, or, if not, he has hegemonised the ‘no deal’ forces and can win an election. If this is so, where can he be prised apart?

Richard Seymour You’re right, we can’t rely on Tory indiscipline. But mark the death‑drive of today’s right. It is already detonating ‘explosive contradictions’ within the party, though not necessarily in ways that benefit the left. Underlying this, I think the Tories have never properly got to grips with democratic governance. Until 1965, the selection of leaders was left to a party elite known as the ‘magic circle’, so they didn’t even have to bother listening to MPs. Until the ‘Hague rules’ in 1998, they didn’t have to listen to the members. When the membership did get a say, they preferred unelectable rightists like Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. They had to be brutally demoralised before they’d choose Cameron.

Cameron should have delivered a new phase of modernisation but didn’t. In addition to his policy feints, he wanted to attract more passive, centre-seeking members and more representative MPs. But it went nowhere, for three reasons: wrong predicates, wrong leader and wrong party. The predicates were wrong, because the electorate wasn’t, even in 2006, as centrist as was assumed. The Tories were already losing votes to a fragmented right: UKIP, the BNP, the English Democrats and Veritas. The leader was complacent and his commitment weak. He fully resembled his caricature in Steve Bell cartoons where he is suited in a condom: slippery, soft-edged, disposable. Hence his ability to ditch ‘red Toryism’ on the turn of a dime. Hence the ‘big society’ proving to be a White Paper tiger.

As for the party, it was, even before the coagulating moment of Brexit, permeated from top to bottom by an increasingly chaos-addicted right. Cameron, pursuant to party unity, offered the reactionaries cabinet posts and concessions. Immigration caps, racist vans, a referendum and the resumption of the Tory hobby he most derided: ‘banging on about Europe’. Cameron was weak, the right was ruthless. Concessions didn’t stop record backbench rebellions, or defections to UKIP: two MPs, several big donors, dozens of councillors, and thousands of members. Nor did it stop almost half of the parliamentary party campaigning for Brexit against the Downing Street position. Dominic Cummings was famously prepared to cut off Cameron’s head every day to get Brexit. As recent polling confirms, moreover, there are a huge number of Conservative members who are not particularly attached to the Conservative Party. For the poujadiste base, this is their last chance to free the ‘little man’ from the ‘globalists’ (dixit Nigel Farage).

So the situation is volatile. If you’re right in your estimate that Boris Johnson seriously intends to lead us into a ‘no deal’ Brexit, then what was an insurgency is a takeover in progress. But a snap election simplifies things. The Tories are ill-prepared for an election and many MPs would struggle to fight an election on a ‘no deal’ platform. The Hammonds, Mundells and Gaukes would find themselves in the wrong party. Labour could make a good offer to Remain voters without sacrificing the salience of class and climate, and keep a lot of Brexit voters on board. It could also offer sweeping constitutional reform as an alternative to mere status quo Remainerism. I am not at all certain Labour would win, and the risks are enormous. A victorious Johnson administration would need to find a growth formula for British capitalism outside Europe. The only thing on their agenda is the Brexit right’s minimalist democracy and bonfire of the regulations. However dysfunctional for capitalism, business will adapt: Trump shows us this. But this is a scenario in which the left has some idea of what it’s doing.

I, however, think the situation is more ambiguous than this. Johnson’s actual affiliations remain unpredictable. The gamble of Tory Remainers is that Johnson will betray his base for the path of least resistance: another Brexit delay. I think that’s highly plausible. I don’t think Johnson wants to be the one to have to cope with the massive economic difficulties resulting from a ‘no deal’ Brexit. But that betrayal would mean an even more toxic meltdown at the top of government, a further discrediting of parliament, and a hysterical and violent atmosphere of victimhood on the right. That sort of diffuse popular phenomenon is difficult to tackle directly, and unpredictable in its effects. I fear Labour, due to its timidity on race, is not well disposed to cope with that. And if the Tories do crash and burn, Farage – a more difficult, ideological opponent than Johnson – is waiting.

Whatever democracy we have, most notably the rights to vote, to organise, to demonstrate, to strike, have been won by people fighting for them on the streets, in their workplaces and communities. Now we are on the streets again to defend and extend the right, through our Members of Parliament, to call the government to account.

Our rights to vote and to organise are severely limited by the institutions of our so-called ‘parliamentary democracy’ which are in fact fundamentally undemocratic, a lasting consequence of the unfinished nature of Britain’s democratic revolution in the 17th century. This revolution briefly produced a (flawed) republic but was thwarted by the restoration of the monarchy with powers through its political servants in parliament: ‘Her Majesty’s Government’. Thus, we have the universal franchise to vote for our parliamentary representatives, but the oath that these same MPs swear is not to the people to whom they owe their election, but to the crown.

This symbolises the distinctively centralised nature of power, disguised by the ritual of ‘the crown in parliament’. All that flummery and pomposity, robes and rods, crowns and courtiers that is on show at the Queen’s speech are an elaborate disguise for the fact that the executive (the government), and particularly the Prime Minister, have in effect the power of a monarch. They rule in the name of the monarch, effectively accountable to no one between elections.

Boris Johnson’s attempt to close down parliament, with the Queen’s assent, has revealed the real relations of power beneath the seemingly harmless, decorative show. Over the years, MPs have struggled to gain some rights to make the executive accountable and, in the Labour Party, to make MPs accountable to their constituents rather than to the crown. They’ve won some minor victories – stronger select committees for instance, but they have not been able to challenge the fact of an over bearing, over centralised, over secretive executive, whose hidden powers can all too easily be abused by a desperate Prime Minister lacking a popular mandate – unless the people revolt and continue the democratic revolution.

In 1991, Tony Benn MP made what has been perhaps the most radical challenge to this concentration of power so far when he proposed the Commonwealth of Britain Bill. It was seconded by the future leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. It proposed abolishing the British monarchy, with the United Kingdom becoming a ‘democratic, federal and secular Commonwealth of Britain’, or in effect a republic with a codified constitution. It was introduced by Benn a number of times until he retired in 2001, but never achieved a second reading. ‘Under the Bill:

The monarchy would be abolished and the constitutional status of the crown ended;
The Church of England would be disestablished;

The head of state would be a president, elected by a joint sitting of both Houses of the Commonwealth Parliament;

The functions of the royal prerogative would be transferred to Parliament;

The Privy Council would be abolished, and replaced by a Council of State;

The House of Lords would be replaced by an elected House of the People, with equal representation of men and women;

The House of Commons would similarly have equal representation of men and women;

England, Scotland and Wales would have their own devolved National Parliaments with responsibility for devolved matters as agreed;

County Court judges and magistrates would be elected; and

British jurisdiction over Northern Ireland would be ended.

The judiciary would be reformed and a National Legal Service would be created.’

This proposal, made by Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn, is more relevant today than ever, as the reckless actions of a Prime Minister concerned only to consolidate and maintain his personal power reveal that we are not governed by a parliamentary democracy but rather by a constitutional monarchy under which we are subjects not citizens. A genuinely democratic constitution based on the principle of popular sovereignty must be an urgent priority for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour government and for the movement that would make this government possible.

Britain’s political crisis just got much deeper when the prime minister announced he would suspend parliament from mid-September for five weeks. Coming the day after MPs agreed a cross-party plan to avoid No Deal, it’s clear that Boris Johnson’s purpose is to prevent MPs from having time to stop his dangerous vision for Brexit.

Whether you were for Leave or Remain, this is about democracy. We cannot allow this prime minister to suspend parliament because he doesn’t think it will vote for No Deal. Every one of us needs to stand up and be counted.

At Global Justice Now, we always feared that Brexit would be used to push through a radical programme of deregulation and liberalisation, which is why we campaigned to remain in the EU during the referendum. It’s why we set out our red lines for any acceptable Brexit deal in the aftermath of the result. And it’s why we opposed Theresa May’s deal earlier this year.

Since Boris Johnson became prime minister, we have got a clearer idea of what this extreme Brexit would look like: a toxic trade deal with the US, a hostile environment extended to millions more migrants, and free market policies extended into more and more aspects of our society. Now he is attempting to bypass our elected parliament to force this through.

It’s what the author and activist Naomi Klein has called ‘the shock doctrine’, creating a political crisis in order to restructure an economy in deeply unpopular ways. Johnson knows that he can’t get this vision through parliament, so he’s proposing to render our elected representatives powerless to stop it.

A dangerous moment

This attack on democratic rights is part of a global trend which is being used by authoritarian leaders in the United States, India, Brazil, the Philippines and more. Donald Trump and his fellow populist leaders are attempting to subvert democracy so they can push through policies which will make the world a less fair, equal or sustainable place.

We would never claim that our democracy is perfect. We urgently need to reform our political system, as well as radically change our economy and our relationship with our environment. But Johnson’s attack on our democratic rights will only make it harder.

This is a very serious moment for this country, and a very dangerous moment for the world. Please help challenge this attack on our democratic rights, and using those rights to work for a better world. Sign the petition against the suspension of parliament. Join the nationwide protests this Saturday 31 August to defend democracy and #StopTheCoup.

]]>The Harland and Wolff workers want to make renewable energy. A Labour government would help themhttps://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-harland-and-wolff-workers-want-to-make-renewable-energy-a-labour-government-would-help-them/
Sat, 24 Aug 2019 15:40:06 +0000http://www.redpepper.org.uk/?p=25638A Westminster framing of the struggle over the historic Harland and Wolff shipyards narrow it to one of market versus state: “a purely commercial matter” says Boris Johnson, typically ducking the problem. “We will bring the yards into public ownership,” says John McDonnell, anticipating Labour’s plans for government-led industrial reconstruction.

The shipyard workers themselves, however, now occupying the yards are taking the search for an alternative to a deeper level, addressing the substantive issue of production itself, envisaging a future based not on the fantasy of a return to the grand Titanic-style liners of the past but on producing the infrastructure and inner working of equipment for generating renewable energy through harnessing the power of the wind and the waves.

They are in practice, challenging the value judgement implicit in Johnson’s appeal to the market: that only the market can judge the social merit of a product; only if a product has a market does it have a value. On the contrary, the workers insist, it would be criminal, in the face of the climate emergency to waste skills and productive capacity which could at minimum cost and through government procurement (and hence political not market, decisions) be put to use immediately to reduce at least the UK’s carbon emissions.

All this would require government support in the interests of citizen survival, a sphere in which the market has clearly failed; indeed the unregulated corporate driven market is the main driver of climate chaos threat.

Moreover, the initiative of the Belfast workers points to a new direction for public ownership and state led reconstruction, a direction already being worked on by Labour. The shipyard workers’ alternative plan, based on a detailed audit of the yard’s productive capacity and on their own skills and experience, illustrates the importance of John McDonnell’s insistence on a new democratic management of public companies based on the principle that “nobody knows better how to run these industries than those who spend their lives with them”.

McDonnell’s confidence in democratising public ownership as a means of maximising the public benefit of public companies, has been inspired by an interestingly similar initiative in the 1970s, of similarly highly skilled workers, aware and indeed proud of the potential usefulness of their skill to the rest of society.

These workers, designers and engineers, working in the different factories of Lucas Aerospace, had, like the Harland and Wolff workers, a tradition of strong organisation and workplace militancy. But for all this militancy, they had not been able to stop the steady decline of jobs; in their case this was mainly the result of technological change as well as competition driven company rationalisations.

As in Belfast, factory closures were the final straw and as with the shipyards, an occupation by itself, was not sufficient to stop closure. For that the Lucas Aerospace workers believed they needed to win political and public support. Tony Benn, then minister for industry, like John McDonnell, was already talking about bringing Aerospace components – and hence Lucas Aerospace into public ownership.

But the workers wanted a deeper kind of change: they’d seen that public ownership of the mines and the railways did not change how the companies were managed or who benefited from their economic “success”. Government increased its revenues but at the same cost of workers’ jobs as in the private sector.

Learning lessons from this, they envisaged public ownership not as an end in itself but a means to sustainable, satisfying and socially useful employment over which they had some control. With this in mind the workplace trade union leaders from the different Lucas Areospace factories, asked their members to draw up an inventory of local machinery and skills and suggest the alternative products they could design or make to meet unmet social needs.

The workers came up with 150 different product ideas for transport – they actually designed the prototype of a “road rail vehicle”; energy conservation, aids for the handicapped, inspired by discussions at local hospitals, and more. The Lucas Aerospace Workers Plan for Socially Useful Production became a beacon for a democratic and ecological economics.

Its ideas live on as vivid, practical proof that there are alternatives to market-driven imperatives, high-carbon energy generation and manufacturing generally, the arms economy and the employment with which it has been associated. At the core of these alternatives is a participatory and productive form of democracy which releases, and harnesses for the benefit of society the human capacities which the private profit driven market deems “redundant”. Were Labour to make this approach central to its election campaign combined with a strengthening of EU restraints on corporate power, it would become the party able really “to take back control”.

Lowkey burst onto the political scene in 2009, during Stop the War protests against Operation Cast Lead in Gaza and quickly established himself as a unique and uncompromising voice in British hip hop. Aged just 24, he recorded Fire in the Booth for BBC 1Xtra, which went on to amass five million YouTube hits. Later that year, he joined American academic Norman Finkelstein on a US speaking tour.
After bowing out from the scene to focus on his studies, Lowkey resurfaced during the snap election of 2017. Alongside grime artists and rappers including Stormzy, Jme, Akala and AJ Tracey, he used his profile to help get out the youth vote for Jeremy Corbyn – an intervention that helped deliver an extraordinary Labour victory by just 20 votes in his home constituency of Kensington and Chelsea. Then, one week later, the Grenfell fire happened.

What led you to intervene during the 2017 general election?
It was seeing that we genuinely had an alternative to a political class dedicated to serving corporate power. As people used to throwing metaphorical molotovs from behind the barricades, we saw one of our number actually leading the Labour Party.Did you worry that the integrity of your own political message could be diluted by association with the Labour Party?
Not really. Whether it’s Ramsay MacDonald’s social imperialism, or Clement Attlee – who, at the same time as giving Britain the welfare state, was involved in the [Malayan] Emergency, which had soldiers posing with the heads of the people they were suppressing – I’m quite realistic about the Labour Party. I look at a leader like Keir Hardie, who asked, when entering World War One, how is it that we can come to the defence of Belgium when Belgium is responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the Congo as a colonial power? I view Jeremy Corbyn in that vein.
It’s about having people in positions like that who are receptive to social movements from below. We could spend the day sitting in a room on our own being pure or put ourselves in a position where we have a chance to massively improve things. Standing on the sidelines is a luxury I just don’t think we can afford.Yours was part of a collective contribution by high-profile artists in your constituency, which turned Kensington and Chelsea Labour.
Far higher profile than me. Jme, AJ Tracey, Akala, Stormzy – this is massive support. Not one of those people was doing it because the Labour Party paid them.
[We won by] a very small number of votes. I’m pretty sure that our intervention affected younger people in the area especially. I was saying, look, go register to vote, go on, do it, and they did it, they voted. They would not have viewed a Labour Party led by Ed Miliband as different enough to justify their participation.What qualified you guys to be that agent of change?
A crude free-marketeer would describe it as ‘social capital’. While these young people we were talking to might not have participated in an election before, they would have definitely watched Fire in the Booth. Through years of work, we had gained an intimacy with them – in the way they understand the world, in the way they think about things. We spoke to them in a language that no – or very few – politicians spoke to them. They saw us support causes that mattered to them. They’d seen us in the area on a regular basis. We’d played football with them, we’d been in youth clubs with them, we’d taught them lessons.
Especially when it comes to me and Akala, there’s many young people that we’d see in the area and try to help in different ways. There’s that level of trust, so when coming out and advocating for something, they know we’re not doing it for an ulterior motive.
Jeremy Corbyn is also very well-known and has held his constituency longer than I’ve been alive. He is known for helping people on a myriad of things from immigration cases to housing. He has a good reputation as a politician with integrity. So when we’re coming forward and advocating for him it’s more likely to be believable.What did you do during the campaign?
I could have done a lot more actually. I was part of a campaign to try to get people to register to vote. I did a video supporting that. I then did an interview which ended up being the beginning of the Double Down News initiative. I said I’d do interviews with anyone and everyone that will interview me. I didn’t go door to door but I don’t necessarily rule it out for future campaigns.
People remember my intervention because of the Double Down video. Over two days it had something like four million views on Facebook. These videos don’t necessarily have a very long life but they do have quite a high level of virality.Then, a week later, the Grenfell fire happened. How did you respond?
It was the height of optimism and then the height of despair and pain. I felt things can really change, we’re really in with a chance. And then of course the fire happened.
Something I remember about the refurbishment to Grenfell. When it was going on, Margaret Thatcher died. Someone had written ‘RIP MAGGIE’ on the board around the tower. Someone had then crossed out the RIP and wrote ‘FU MAGGIE’. It’s weird. There’s something poetic about it that her mark [was there].
Because if we’re talking about politicians, despite the fact that legally the duty of care returns to the government, it’s very difficult to directly attribute blame and responsibility for the fire. We can, when we’re talking about companies, be really clear about who was responsible for what. But really it was the adoption of this way of viewing public institutions and this way of viewing labour, of this pitting of the global forces of labour against each other and into direct competition. It was this that Margaret Thatcher was a zealous advocate for. Her fingerprint was still on Grenfell Tower.What did you do?
My wife was sleeping. I saw it happening out of the window. At first I heard fire engines. I hadn’t been looking at my phone. I saw people gathering, they were in their pyjamas, and then I looked to the right and I saw Grenfell on fire.
It was quite early in the fire but it was spreading upwards. Then obviously I woke up my wife and went down into the street. The cladding, the Celotex insulation, which it now turns out was giving off cyanide and could be carcinogenic, was raining down on us. It was all over our hair. That’s why I say in one of my songs, ‘black snow on a summer’s night’. The whole street was covered in it.
Talking to people. Saying, ‘Oh my god, is that person in there?’ ‘Has that person got out?’ I found out early on that my friend Ed, who was one of the main figures in the Grenfell Action Group and had predicted the fire, had escaped.
I was just watching the situation and trying to be useful in some way. Pretty much everyone in the street was from the area and was horrified. People were crying. It was just apocalyptic.
There was a particular family, on the 21st floor. We saw the mother, the husband that was with her, waving from the window. Helicopter comes towards them, within a hundred or so metres. Then it turns around. That turnaround was just so painful. Seven or eight hours later, I see on the front page of the Evening Standard, a picture of that family in their dying moments taken from a horizontal viewpoint. It’s one of the things that still to this day disgusts me, the media mill still rolling.
It upsets me how invisible Arconic and Celotex have been allowed to remain and how the government is providing camouflage for them. They’ve taken a public institution like the fire brigade and put them through the grinder, but then they’ve given Arconic and Celotex seemingly till 2020 to prepare their story, which is ridiculous when you consider how massive they are as corporations. These companies are just being allowed to get away scot free. It’s disgusting.As a politically active citizen, who had discovered some kind of ability to change things, what was your response?
There is a theory of ‘hauntology’ by Derrida that was developed by the late Mark Fisher, about the process of being trapped in anticipation of more just futures. Something so unjust takes place that the human being is left pining for a more just resolution and a future which never was. This incident was so unjust and so wrong that people just can’t bring themselves to accept it.
The music I made was a small component of a much wider movement, which involved the founding of Grenfell United and other groups that were finding some way of bringing about an intimacy between decision-makers and the results of their decisions.
We’re also struggling to find some sort of accountability for what happened and so the music is really about that. It’s about that discord, that gap between the signature on a piece of paper and the way that signature manifests into violence that affects people’s lives.
It’s sad that while an event can be such a spectacle and cause such an outpouring of sympathy, it has not been translated into a national literacy about the issue of corporate penetration of regulatory bodies. It’s important that we start to perceive the phenomenon of deregulation, privatisation and austerity as acts of violence.And so your music has sought to do the same thing. Was it doing that prior to 2017?
It’s quite a complex process. The sophistication of your music has to increase. The war on terror is quite a hysterical age and so you can make hyperbolic statements in a kind of international relations lingo. But the perspective that emphasises the interactions between states doesn’t necessarily take into account the dialectics that play out between social grassroots movements and the state, and so I think the music had to start to take into account these kind of things.Is that how we should see your new album, Soundtrack to the Struggle 2?
It’s what I would aspire to. I’ll give you an example. In the first album, we use a speech juxtaposing US foreign policy to the idea of terrorism against the United States. Essentially, it’s accusing the US government of state-sponsored terrorism. Now that’s definitely a discourse that’s more complex than the one we’re presented by the mainstream media, which largely invisibilises US foreign policy and animalises and irrationalises any violence that is taken against any US troops anywhere. That’s one way.
The second album, we’re opening with Noam Chomsky and me discussing JP Morgan Chase investing in fossil fuels and what that will mean for human existence over the next half century. That’s a slightly more complex point. Whereas the first album is making a very large statement about state power, the second is making a point about the relationship between state power and corporate power: how that then affects human beings, what that then will mean for the future.
The tracks that people connect with more easily are ‘Ragheads and Pakis are worrying your dad, but your dad’s favourite food is curry and kebab.’ Kind of crude, kind of silly, but people can get with it. But then if you’re talking about Nasser naming craters on the moon after Khalifa (the Caliph of Baghdad in the 1900s), or the root of the word ‘algorithms’ coming from al-Khwarizmi (who was a polymath in the 9th and 10th century who was estimating the circumference of the globe when the consensus in Europe was that the earth was flat), it’s more complex. Nothing on the first album could come near to the level of critical thought needed for that kind of stuff.Your song ‘Ghosts of Grenfell’ is a culmination of the things we’re talking about: the power of the video, your music, coming out of the community, coming out of that moment…
It was a small component of a far wider movement. It was just a musical part of something that was happening in the tangible real world. People are aching for a more just world. The kind of disbelief that something like this had happened and that people were living with it every day.
What happened there in the tower was so horrific that it’s become reflected in the walls all around the area. So you can’t forget it for a moment, you can’t live as if it never happened.
I think the biggest failure of British society has been the failure to see itself in the people that died. If people had, those companies would not be operating in the country right now.How has becoming a husband and a father impacted your music and politics?
Politically, it makes you appreciate the urgency of the present in the long shadow it will cast over the future, so you understand that the battles you fight today will be ones that your son or daughter will gain or lose from. You realise the importance of you doing stuff. The other thing is that you look at people with a greater sensitivity to their vulnerability, and you understand how that can be personified in their children. They have something which is like the embodiment of their heart walking around the world and it can bring them the height of joy but it can also just destroy them in a flash.
It’s a different way of viewing other people. It’s something that lends itself to looking at people with a little more sensitivity.What lies ahead for you, in terms of the personal and the cultural/political?
We really need to find a way to stop the governments of the world subsiding the fossil fuel industry. That is, as Chomsky says on the album, a moral imperative. We have to reconfigure our relationship with the environment. We have to stop allowing it to be dictated by companies which are taking us to the point of no return.
The plan is to finish my masters and to write more music and speak to people. And to make another album or EP, potentially before the end of this year.
I’m thankful that you and others have been interested in my music enough to write about it, to listen to it. I did an interview the other day with a guy who had measured the syllables I was rapping per second. He found that at one point I had rapped 10 syllables in one second, and he had compared that to the entry in the Guinness Book of Records, which was 11.4 syllables per second. If people are listening to my music to this extent, then it would be wasteful to not use this kind of position to do something substantial with it.Soundtrack to the Struggle 2 is out now.

]]>Out of the gloomhttps://www.redpepper.org.uk/out-of-the-gloom/
Thu, 08 Aug 2019 09:00:03 +0000http://www.redpepper.org.uk/?p=25597It may be summer in the northern hemisphere but politics is more gloomy and the lack of light demoralising. The latest information about the precariousness of our planet and, at the same time, the relentless rise of the racist right, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to the Brexit Party in Britain, makes Fredric Jameson’s famous remark, ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, as realistic as ever. As it does Mark Fisher’s explanation in terms of all the work that has gone into ‘persuading people that it is the only viable system’, so that ‘capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable’.
A glib response is to take up the challenge by simply resolving that we anti-capitalists had better get our act together to catch up and convince people that there is an alternative after all.
It is glib for several reasons. First, because it is not evident who the anti-capitalist social forces are that have the capacity to ‘catch up’ with the pace at which the end of the world is looming into sight. They are certainly not just the anti-capitalists of the past. Many (and I include myself) have been too slow fully to understand the Promethean character of capital accumulation, appropriating nature to fuel its rapacious drive for profit, and the racialised nature of capitalist exploitation.
New generations of activists are coming together, however, in ways defined not only by their youth but also by a qualitatively greater diversity of race, gender and relation to wage labour. They are awakening the imaginations of many others who until now have feared irreversible damage to the planet but never imagined an end to the capitalist system of production that caused it. These new and determined organisers come from communities at the frontlines of both climate change and the attacks of the far right.
Indeed, it is the convergence of these two threats that begins to undermine capitalist persuasion. Such persuasion has worked in the global north because its employed population has a vested interest, albeit partial, in the present system. It is, relatively speaking, privileged in the context of climate crisis – what Cameron Joshi describes as ‘the greatest act of systemic racism in human history’.
The other side of this is that the people who suffer most, north and south, are those on whom the system depends and who therefore have a significant source of power when they refuse to comply with its reproduction (see ‘Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion’). And since it is corporate power that is at the centre of the racist climate crisis, then the revolt of the most dispossessed – whose growing self-organisation is described by Shaista Aziz (page 27) – makes it possible to imagine the end of corporate capitalism.
But revolt from below alone is not sufficient. For the transformational power of the dispossessed to be fully realised we also need legislative power. It is the hope of this combination of state power with the transformational power of the dispossessed that Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to the Labour leadership embodied.
We cannot afford to lose this dynamic under the pressure of Brexit and of Westminster. But we have a lot to do to keep that hope alive. Look out for the next issue of Red Pepper as Labour meets in September, hopefully to renew its ability to support the new forces of change to take control alongside the old.
]]>Hungary: Europe’s creeping fascismhttps://www.redpepper.org.uk/hungary-europes-creeping-fascism/
Fri, 12 Jul 2019 09:00:40 +0000http://www.redpepper.org.uk/?p=25607

Photo: Nikodem Nijaki/Wikimedia Commons

Just along from the Hungarian parliament building, visitors to Budapest can find Shoes on the Danube Bank. Consisting of 60 shoes facing the river looking westwards, it is a deeply poignant memorial to the Budapest Jews who were murdered by the fascist Arrow Cross government between 1944 and 1945. They were ordered to remove their shoes before being shot. Their bodies fell into the river.
Those killed in this way were only a fraction of Hungarian victims of the Holocaust. In 56 days during the summer of 1944 alone, Hungarian authorities worked with the Nazi regime to deport 437,402 Jews, primarily to the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Standing so close to the Hungarian parliament, the memorial is a reminder of the fragility of democracy and the terrible atrocities committed during the second world war.New and old forms
There is nothing specifically Hungarian about these experiences, of course. Europe has an intensely violent and racist history. No corner of the continent can claim innocence when it comes to the history and legacy of fascism.
The sheer horror of this past can also sometimes blind us to the emergence of nationalism and fascism in new forms. If there are no extermination camps, should we therefore be content that the contemporary far right has adapted to, and accepted, democracy and minority rights? Progressives and democrats in many European countries today face this question squarely. Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain, to name only some of the most prominent cases, are all countries that have either a growing or consolidated far-right presence in their national political scene.
Perhaps because of the history attached to the terminology of fascism, many observers are reluctant to describe these developments in such language, preferring instead to label it ‘far-right populism’. The danger of this linguistic shift is that it can aid the normalisation of these new far-right forces into an accepted part of the European political landscape. Twentieth-century fascism did not, after all, begin the journey to the extermination camps by acknowledging this as its goal.
Part of the mobilising power of the new far right in Europe lies in the ‘memory politics’ of how 20th-century fascism is thought about today. The new far right rejects any notion of national responsibility for fascism. They claim they are not in continuity with these historical movements, while drawing on an idea of majority-white victimhood that resembles classical fascist discourses: that a liberal elite is systematically disadvantaging white-native populations to the benefit of ethnic and religious minorities.Illiberal democracy
Today, Hungary stands at the centre of these developments. Since 2010, under prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz government, the country has pioneered what they call ‘illiberal democracy’. For international observers the language Orbán and his party use is particularly striking for just how explicitly they reject liberal norms. They oppose the notion that civil society has rights and freedoms in relation to the state on the grounds that these are private associations, which have not been elected by the majority. They use similar ‘majoritarian’ sophistry to reject the idea that minority groups and ethnicities have human rights.
Whereas far-right parties are usually thought of as becoming more moderate as they move closer to power, Fidesz tells a different story. The party began life after the fall of communism as a young, liberal, even idealistic party, but over time has become deeply conservative. Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a Hungarian oppositionist, left the party in 1994. She draws a parallel between Orbán’s autocratic takeover of the party from 1992 onwards with his rule in office.
‘Very early on Viktor Orbán… pushed the party… with a strong hand… The whole decision making process, especially related to party finances, very quickly became un-transparent,’ she says. For Szelényi, it was Orbán’s desire for power, rather than any deep ideological commitment to nationalist values, that has motivated him.Concentration of power
Many Hungarian oppositionists share this perspective. They argue that the often-shocking pronouncements of the Fidesz government on migration and Islam are used cynically to win support and de-legitimise opponents.
Dániel Bartha, the director of a Budapest-based think-tank, argues that the biggest concrete effect of the Orbán regime has been ‘power concentration on a massive scale’. Fidesz has created a new loyal elite in business, public institutions, universities and the media, which is justified through the language of Hungarian nationalism and economic development.
One effect has been the abolition of a level playing field among parties competing in elections. Vast amounts of taxpayers’ money have been spent on government ‘information campaigns’, for example, that have targeted George Soros and outgoing EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker as figures representing a pro-immigrant, anti-Christian conspiracy of global liberalism against Hungary. Independent media has been aggressively marginalised as the government has lavished advertising revenue on supportive outlets, while boycotting critical ones. Its business supporters have then joined in, starving them of funds. Public sector broadcasters have also been turned into uncritical supporters of the government.International appeal
Orbán’s rhetoric is without nuance and caveats. His speeches are all translated into English by the Hungarian government and published online, underlining his eagerness to promote these views globally. Conservative politicians have arguably assisted these efforts. Fidesz remains a member of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) grouping, albeit currently suspended pending an investigation. Manfred Weber, the leader of the EPP, tweeted his congratulations to Orbán following his 2018 victory in the Hungarian elections, in spite of the fact that just a few days earlier Orbán had told Hungarian voters they faced a struggle to save their homeland from ‘the alchemical workshop of George Soros’ and that ‘migration is the rust that would slowly but surely consume our country.’ The combination of antisemitism and Islamophobia, where Jews are attacked for giving support to Muslim immigration, is a key theme of the new far right.
Other centre-right politicians have also happily aligned with the Fidesz regime. In March, Orbán spoke at a conference in Budapest on migration alongside former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Orbán used his speech to outline his version of the so‑called ‘great replacement’ alt-right conspiracy theory, which says migration is part of a liberal elite plot.
In Britain, Orbán’s biggest supporter has been Nigel Farage. ‘Thank God, there is one European leader who is prepared to stand up for his principles, his nation, his culture, and his people,’ Farage said recently. The rise of Farage’s new Brexit Party has been a boost to the European far right.
EU institutions will be a critical theatre for the fight against the rise of fascism in the decade ahead. Whatever the final nature of Britain’s position in Europe, it is essential that we join the international resistance to the far-right advance and take our anti-fascist responsibilities seriously.Luke Cooper is a visiting fellow on the Europe’s Futures programme at the Institute of Human Sciences (Vienna). He is currently working on a book and podcast documentary series on the crisis of EuropeVoices from Hungarian civil societyCaught up in the government’s campaign of hateZoltán Mester
Since 2006, the Emberség Erejével (With the Power of Humanity) Foundation has been engaged in human rights education in Pécs, near the Croatian border, in southern Hungary. The city is the centre of an economically underdeveloped, poor region, a vibrant university town, and a European Capital of Culture in 2010.
In 2010, the foundation began to work with disadvantaged children living in a poor part of Pécs, and in 2013 it opened a school for them. The main mission, besides helping learning, is to create equal opportunities, so poor children can experience activities that are unusually inaccessible to them.
It is the foundation’s most recent activity, though, which has provoked a full attack from the powerful. The Growing Civic Communities programme will see the foundation distribute 100 million forints (£270,000) to civil society and community organisations over three years, from the Open Society Foundation. This has seen us caught up in the government’s propaganda campaigns against George Soros and Hungarian NGOs supported by his foundations.
The culmination of the hate campaign was an adoption of a statement by the Pécs General Assembly, which asked the townspeople not to let us rent an office for our foundation. As a result, we lost our rental property, but fortunately we got a lot of other offers.
Today, the centrally organized propaganda campaign has lost its intensity, though government representatives are still trying to make our work more difficult.
We have developed a strategy of focusing on positive communication, trying to do the work we believe in, regardless of the circumstances, with universal and European values that are currently not very popular in Hungary. In our opinion, in the 30 years since the change of regime, there has never been such a great need for European organizations, institutions and foundations to be active and effective in supporting Hungarian society.
Fighting for the right to housing in an illiberal democracyÉva Tessza Udvarhelyi
The City is for All is a grassroots housing advocacy group fighting for the dignity of homeless people and the right to housing for all. Our group was founded in 2009 by homeless people and their allies. Since our foundation, we have been actively fighting against the criminalisation of homelessness, evictions without alternative placement, the destruction of self-built shacks, the police harassment of homeless people as well as for the right to an address and the right to decent social services among other things.
In the past three years, around 10,000 evictions have taken place in Hungary, which means that tens of thousands of people have lost their homes. While the Orbán government has dedicated huge amounts of public money to support home ownership of more well-off families, it terminated the national housing allowance scheme available to low-income people, refuses to develop public housing and ignores the exponentially rising rents in urban centers.
In addition to aggressively dismantling the welfare state and the rule of law that affect all Hungarians, the Orbán government has specifically targeted street homeless people by passing a series of laws since 2010 that made Hungary the only country in the world that criminalizes sleeping in public space at the level of the constitution. The latest variation of this law, which makes it possible to detain homeless people and put them in jail for sleeping on the street, is currently being reviewed by the Constitutional Court.
The City is for All and our sister organisation the Streetlawyer Association, along with many other NGOs and artists, public intellectuals, actors, medical professionals, social professionals and regular citizens, have stood up against this unjust and inhumane law by protesting, providing legal aid and representation and offering individual support to homeless people.
Waiting for the end of the darkness as the free media fadesNagy Gergely Miklós
The landscape of Hungarian media has been changed a lot during the nine years of Orbán government – though the word ‘change’ is too mild for how frightening the shift has been.
To be honest, I’m not sure exactly when it started. Before 2010 (the year Orbán came to power) there was a wide range of different media, with left-wing, liberal or right-wing values. Dailies, news portals, weeklies, radio – the usual. Our democracy wasn’t perfect, and it was young, but the media landscape felt quite normal.
Now it is all gone.
Now we don’t talk about ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ press any more, but about the expanding propaganda machine. This media pushes out anti‑immigration messages 24 hours day, and attempts to intimidate and destroy anyone who dares to publicly criticise the government.
Sometimes they use people’s personal information against them. Sometimes they bully people’s family members. They wield the full force of public media to serve power.
Hungary’s ruling party, Fidesz, continues to buy up media outlets, close them, control the advertising market, and generally suffocate the remains of the real press or transform it into yet more propaganda.
To be frank, I am not very optimistic about the situation. All of this fits into a bigger picture. What Orbán has done and does day by day is not something new, but a special version of the new wave of national populism. Simple messages, named scapegoats, always at a high volume. In Western Europe or in the USA, the various institutes and wider civil society would have more capacity to resist these voices and their populist impacts. But a country like Hungary, which hasn’t got very deep roots in democratic traditions, could get into bigger trouble.
Nevertheless, the lesson is very clear for us and could be for everybody: if any government starts to attack the press, that is just the first sign. Don’t wait for the second.
]]>The reactionary rebellionhttps://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-reactionary-rebellion/
Thu, 11 Jul 2019 09:00:44 +0000http://www.redpepper.org.uk/?p=25599The experiences in Hungary, Poland, Austria and elsewhere make clear the anti-democratic character of Europe’s new right-wing extremist parties, which, once in government, infiltrate the state apparatus in order to take precautions against their being deprived of power again. Is it possible, then, to speak, in a scientific sense, of a fascist danger in Europe?
Over the past year, the biotope of modernised, right-wing extremist parties in Europe has spread virally. We are not speaking about violent, militant fringe groups but rather about parties who have found their way to the commanding heights of states across the continent. Should we use the term ‘fascism’ to label these parties, well-aware of the strong historical associations this term evokes?
We might also ask, from the point-of-view of tactics, whether it makes sense to emphasise and give prominence to the objectively existing continuity between present‑day right-wing extremist parties and historical fascism. Is there a difference between the historical far right in Europe and what the mainstream of empirical political science today calls ‘right‑wing populism’?
Critical theorists such as Hannah Arendt and Karl Polanyi agreed with the Communist left in the past on the point that fascism was the political answer of one part of the bourgeois class to the crisis of liberal democracy. Thus, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936, ‘Fascism attempts to organise the newly-created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure … Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.’
However true it may be that we cannot effectively fight modernised, right-wing radicalism with the slogans, language and symbols of the interwar period, it is still the case that today’s radical, neo-fascist, populist or otherwise right-wing parties’ grab for power can only be understood in the context of capitalist property and dominance relations.
In this sense I would like to present for discussion the following five theses:
1. The extreme right-wing parties want to establish an authoritarian state. For that reason, it is appropriate to speak of neo-fascism.
2. In several countries neo-fascism has made its way into the heart of societies, and in others it has shifted the agenda of traditionally conservative parties to the right.
3. The crisis has produced a fertile breeding ground for this. But only its interpretation within the framework of the patterns of meaning provided by neoliberalism make entire populations vulnerable to neo-fascism.
4. The rise of neo-fascism is a European phenomenon, finding its expression in transnational party formations in and outside the European Parliament.
5. The paradox of a nationalist ‘international’ is resolved in that conflicting nationalisms of moderate and radical parties of the right have found a common vanishing point in their opposition to the European Union.Right-wing extremist parties and the state
Seven weeks after the elections that led to an absolute majority for the Law and Justice party (PiS) in the Polish parliament, Die Zeit published an article headed ‘How a new state is emerging’, in which it said that ‘step by step the new government is rebuilding Poland into a right-wing nationalist state’.
Since then the PiS government has done its best to meet such expectations, trying to get control over the decisive power positions in the state – for instance, by its effort to take control of the supreme court, which caused the European Commission to initiate infringement proceedings against Poland last year. At the same time, the government is tightening its control over the media, including censorship measures and politically motivated dismissals.
Similar developments have taken place in Hungary, where Fidesz enacted a ‘Basic Law’ in 2012. This starts with a national avowal of the ethnic-cultural nature of Hungary, thus defining the framework of legislation and administration – for example, by distinguishing general human rights from civic rights, which remain the privilege of Hungarians inside and outside the borders of the country.
In Austria, the Freedom Party (FPÖ), which is a nationalist party, however not faithful to its country but to a unified ‘greater Germany’, is now in charge of the police, army and secret services. As part of its determination to create a ‘deep state’ under its control, the FPÖ is extending its powers across a muiltitude of state institutions, from the national statistics institute to the public broadcasting service.
In all these cases, there is no reason to presume innocence. Wherever right-wing radical parties enter government, they act according to a straightforward principle: tolerate no more democracy than necessary and enforce as much authoritarianism as possible.
In doing so, they are acting as parties of the capitalist elites. Chasing them from power requires mobilising the majorities in our societies for democracy. In order to do so, it is important to see who the voters for neo-fascist parties are.
Mainstream political science answers the question by referring to the high votes for neo-fascist parties among the working class. The typical voter is portrayed as male, white, with a low income and level of education, located predominantly in declining industrial regions and outside urban conglomerations.
From here, it is a short road to regarding neo-fascism as a phenomenon spreading only in the lower classes. This leads straight to the so-called ‘populism thesis’, according to which populists are dividing the population into ‘corrupt elites’ and a ‘good, clean people’.
But populists address the people in a special way, namely through the medium of the reactionary prejudice, or, as Adorno has shown in his study about the authoritarian character, through ‘anti‑democratic resentment’, which is not contrary to the neoliberal worldview but forms an inherent part of it.

Marine Le Pen, head of France’s far-right National Rally party, with Tomio Okamura, leader of the Czech far-right SPD, and Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders of the PVV

This is why the discursive cleavage in politics between right and left continues to be important. This can be illustrated by data from the first ballot of the 2017 French presidential elections, when the votes of blue and white-collar workers were polarised between the far-right Marine Le Pen (39% and 30% respectively) and left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon (24% and 25%).
Contrary to the mainstream political science thesis that populism evades being assigned to either left or right, 70% of voters for Mélenchon identified themselves as ‘left’, while 63% of Le Pen voters called themselves ‘right’ in post-electoral surveys. This is confirmed by the decisive motives the interviewees expressed: social security, healthcare and an increase in mass purchasing power on the left, and the fight against terrorism, crime and criminality on the right.A pan-European phenomenon
It is no longer possible to analyse the spread of the extreme right-wing biotope in different countries as parallel but independent phenomena. The rise of the far right is a pan-European phenomenon. From 1999 to 2014, the share of seats of extreme right-wing and neo-fascist parties in the European Parliament more than doubled from 11% to 23%. According to the most recent projections as Red Pepper went to press, these parties can expect 25% of seats in the May elections, which would make them the second largest bloc.
This clearly shows that the kind of nationalism embodied by the extreme right-wingers and neo‑fascists has become an alternative, reactionary concept not only as far as the restructuring of individual states is concerned but with regard to Europe as a whole.
In the incumbent European Parliament, the far right is split into three fractions. Of these, the most dynamic unifying force is the ‘Europe of Nations and Freedom’ (ENF), embracing the Rassemblement National, the Freedom Party, the Northern League, the Congress of the New Right (Poland), the Czech SPD, the Party for Freedom (PVV) and Vlaams Belang.
The ENF charter is strikingly frank and precise about its objectives: ‘The parties and the individual MEPs of the ENF group base their political alliance on the sovereignty of states… The opposition to any transfer of national sovereignty to supranational bodies and/or European institutions is one of the fundamental principles uniting members of the ENF… They base their political alliance on the preservation of the identity of the citizens and nations of Europe… The right to control and regulate immigration is thus a fundamental principle shared by the members of the ENF group.’
The rejection of the EU in the name of ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘immigration control’ is the common position of all these right-wing extremist parties.
It would be fatal for the left to join in the game of nationalism, precisely because European integration finds itself in a crisis. A collapse of European integration – quite thinkable today – would be positive only if we thought that there was anything better to come, if we supposed that the great problems our societies are facing – such as globalised financial markets, migration, development, climate change, security – could be solved in a better way within a Europe of 28, 35 or 50 national currencies, nation states and border regimes. If that is not the case, the logical necessity is to defend peaceful European integration against nationalism.
At the same time it is no less important to acknowledge that uncritical acceptance of the status quo cannot succeed, and that it is necessary to fight for a radical social, ecological and democratic reformation of the EU and its politics.
To return to the question of whether it is possible to speak, in a scientific sense, of a fascist danger in Europe today, my answer is ambivalent. Not long ago, a friend wrote to me, saying, ‘The light we can see in the tunnel only comes from the entrance behind our backs. It can disappear with the next curve. We need to be alert!’A version of this article appears in the next edition of Transform magazine. It is based on a speech at the ¡No Pasaran! conference in London in MarchThe ultra-nationalist internationalNoam Chomsky
The first article I remember having written on political issues was 80 years ago. Easy to date: it was right after the fall of Barcelona in February 1939.
The article was about what seemed to be the inexorable spread of fascism over the world. In 1938, Austria had been annexed by Nazi Germany. A few months later, Czechoslovakia was betrayed, placed in the hands of the Nazis at the Munich Conference. In Spain, one city after another was falling to Franco’s forces. February 1939, Barcelona fell. That was the end of the Spanish Republic. The remarkable popular revolution, anarchist revolution, of 1936, ’37, ’38, had already been crushed by force. It looked as if fascism was going to spread without end.
It’s not exactly what’s happening today but, if we can borrow Mark Twain’s famous phrase, ‘History doesn’t repeat but sometimes rhymes.’
When Barcelona fell, there was a huge flood of refugees from Spain. Most went to Mexico, about 40,000. Some went to New York, established anarchist offices in Union Square, second-hand bookstores down 4th Avenue. That’s where I got my early political education, roaming around that area.
We didn’t know at the time but the US government was also beginning to think about how the spread of fascism might be virtually unstoppable. They didn’t view it with the same alarm that I did as a 10-year-old. In 1939, the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations began to carry out planning about the post-war world. And in the early years, they assumed that it would be divided between a Nazi-controlled world, most of Eurasia, and a US-controlled world, which would include the western hemisphere, the former British empire, which the US would take over, and parts of the Far East.
Those views, we now know, were maintained until the Russians turned the tide. Stalingrad, 1942, the huge tank battle at Kursk, a little later, made it pretty clear that the Russians would defeat the Nazis. The US planning changed. The picture of the post-war world changed.
Today we are not facing the rise of Nazism, but we are facing the spread of an ultra-nationalist, reactionary international, trumpeted openly by its advocates, including Steve Bannon, the impresario of the movement. The Middle East alliance consists of the extreme reactionary states of the region – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Israel – confronting Iran. We’re facing severe threats in Latin America. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil put in power the most extreme, most outrageous of the right-wing ultra-nationalists who are now plaguing the hemisphere. In western Europe, the right-wing parties are growing, some of them very frightening in character.
At the level of states, the balance looks overwhelmingly in the wrong direction. But states aren’t the only entities. At the level of people, it’s quite different. And that could make the difference. That means a need to protect the functioning democracies, to enhance them, to make use of the opportunities they provide, for the kinds of activism that have led to significant progress in the past could save us in the future.Noam Chomsky was speaking to Democracy Now! in BostonMainstream complicityLiz Fekete
The question is not so much why the far right is a threat to democracy as why mainstream political parties that consider themselves democratic have incorporated far-right perspectives and nativist principles into their welfare, immigration and legal programmes.
Now that extreme-right parties are part of coalition governments in so many countries of Europe, policing, security and immigration policy can be under their influence. But in paying particular attention to the democratic threat this poses, we must not ignore the multitude of other institutions complicit in the erosion of human rights. The Italian coalition government may be dominated by the League, for instance, but its refusal to save lives in the Mediterranean Sea has the tacit approval of the European Commission.Liz Fekete is director of the Institute of Race Relations and author of Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right (Verso)Addressing all issuesCas Mudde
How can we face up to the threat of the far right? More than two decades of failed attempts across western Europe have made clear that copying far-right frames and policies does not stop their rise; it largely does the work for them. The only way to stop the far right and, more importantly, strengthen democracy is to address all issues that people care about, including, but not only, so-called ‘far-right issues’ such as crime, immigration and national sovereignty, and to offer clear and convincing democratic solutions.Cas Mudde’s The Far Right Today (Polity) is out in SeptemberNativist populismK Biswas
The far right’s success over the past decade has emerged from the failure of traditional parties to offer any cogent response to real or perceived economic and cultural disquiet.Initially invited into governing coalitions as ‘support partners’ for traditional conservative parties unable to win parliamentary majorities, far-right parties have shown themselves now capable of winning national ballots across the continent.
I started looking into nativist populism in the aftermath of the financial crash, with my own country, Britain, having just elected two members of the extreme-right BNP to the European Parliament. Political commentators, negligent about the groundswell of anti-elite sentiment swirling around European electorates, are now desperately rushing to ‘explain’ political events they failed to see coming.
Their ‘answers’ remain unconvincing to those who warned them: grassroots activists and migrant-led NGOs, a smattering of writers and thinkers, not to mention vast swathes of Europe’s minority communities. It’s from these groups that any resistance to the far right’s forward march may arise.
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